Bihar BJP Chief Dilip Jaiswal

patna : Bihar Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Dilip Jaiswal on Friday claimed that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has bagged public office in the 2025 assembly elections. Speaking to ANI, Jaiswal said that the NDA is contesting the Bihar assembly polls on behalf of Nitish Kumar.

“It was clear from the faces of the public that this time the NDA will get a mandate. The NDA will form the government again. Be it Nitish Kumar, Chirag Paswan, Jitan Ram Manjhi, Upendra Kushwaha, PM Modi, JP Nadda, HM Amit Shah or Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, the leaders of the NDA have put in a lot of effort. We fought in the election in the name of Nitish Kumar with the slogan ‘2025,’ phir se Nitish,'” Jaiswal said.

As the counting of votes for the Bihar Assembly elections begins, initial trends suggest that the ruling NDA has strengthened its lead over the Mahagathbandhan by crossing the 122-vote mark. At 9.30 am, the NDA was ahead on 172 seats, while the Bharatiya Janata Party and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) were ahead on 75 and 76 seats respectively.

While JD(U) maintained a high conversion rate of over 75 per cent, BJP achieved a conversion rate of 74 per cent. Mahagathbandhan trailed by a margin of just 67 seats. While Tejashwi Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is ahead in 50 seats, its allies are performing poorly as per initial trends. The Congress is ahead with 14 seats, while the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation Party is ahead with three seats. RJD has the highest conversion rate in the alliance at 35 percent.

Meanwhile, Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj was ahead on three seats while AIMIM was ahead on one seat. Among the prominent faces, Tejashwi Yadav is leading in Raghopur seat, while BJP’s Samrat Choudhary and Maithili Thakur are leading in Tarapur and Alinagar seats respectively.

Vote counting for all 243 electoral districts started at 08:00 in the morning under tight security measures. Officials have started counting postal ballots with the counting of EVM votes scheduled to begin at 8:30 am.

There are 4,372 counting tables and elaborate security arrangements with more than 18,000 enumerators overseeing the process. While most exit polls predict a comfortable victory for the NDA, some predict a win for the Mahagathbandhan.

According to ECI’s official press note, 2,616 candidates and 12 recognized political parties participated in the two-phase polls held on November 6 and 11, and none of them requested re-polling in any constituency. The main electoral contest in the Bihar elections is between the National Democratic Alliance led by CM Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav’s Mahagathbandhan. In the 2020 elections, the NDA secured a majority in the assembly and won 125 seats; Nitish Kumar was sworn in as Prime Minister again.

However, in August 2022, Nitish Kumar broke the alliance with the BJP and resigned as the Chief Minister, forming a government with the RJD-Congress-led Mahagathbandhan. The united opposition had emerged as a key figure in the formation of the INDIA bloc.

However, Kumar’s association with the RJD lasted less than two years and ahead of the parliamentary elections in January 2024, Kumar returned to the NDA. The BJP improved its position between the 2015 and 2020 polls. He won 53 of the 157 seats he competed in 2015, and 74 of the 110 seats in 2020. Rashtriya Janata Dal also had a strong performance, winning 80 of the 101 seats it contested in 2015 and 75 of the 144 seats it nominated in the 2020 elections.

JD-U has seen a decline in its performance in the last two polls. He won 71 of the 101 seats he competed in 2015 and 43 of the 115 seats in 2020. The Congress also saw a decline in its performance from the 27 seats it won in 2015 to 19 in 2020.